


Paint

by ceywoozle



Series: One Word Bottomjohn Prompts [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, First Time, M/M, john has a tattoo, sherlock likes to paint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 22:42:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3335492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceywoozle/pseuds/ceywoozle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>part of the one word bottomjohn prompt series.</p><p>john has a tattoo and sherlock finds out about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paint

It's not something John's ever told anyone about. Not for any particular reason, but because it's just not something he talks about. But Harry was an artist, way back when such things mattered, and every year, slipped into his birthday cards, would be a drawing from her.

Back when birthday cards still came.

She sent him one. Once, in Afghanistan. The first one for years. The first time he'd heard from her in ages. A quick piece of art, all clean black lines on a white page, whorling designs that ate the paper to the corners, the earth centred curls of the botanical encompassing the harder steel of things less natural, eating into them, destroying and recreating.

John had looked at it, a mix of sadness and gratitude and bitterness. It was perhaps why he hadn't been paying attention when the first sound of open fire blasted the morning to pieces. It was perhaps why it took him an extra fraction of a second to drop down and get away, leaving his own blood in a trail behind him.

He had clutched it without realising it as they had dragged him back to safety. Crumpled in his fist and edged with dirt and blood, he hadn't let it go as he'd been airlifted away. Not till the needle in his vein, the slow bliss of anaesthesia.

Then had come the waking up like a swimmer out of the fog, followed by more sleep, and then waking up for real. The muffled pillow-thick sludge of too many medications in his blood stream, of unfamiliar faces. Only when he started to function again did he notice it, smoothed out carefully and propped up on the table beside the bed. Still covered in the filth of his own almost-death, that last betrayal of Harry. He asked about her, if someone had called her, and he'd been assured with too-bright smiles that she'd been contacted. Days ago. Someone named Clara had sent their best wishes.

He'd taken it back to London with him, soiled as it was, the edges almost lost. He'd called Harry as soon as he landed and got her voicemail. Tried again over the next few days, reciting the address of the bedsit in a monotone into his phone. A few days later Clara had found him. Handed him the phone Harry had left behind when she'd vanished in the wake of her latest alcohol-scented haze, wished him the best, then left again.

He'd gone the next day, scrounging up money from his sparse supply. Found the cleanest place he could find, somewhere that didn't send all his medical instincts screaming, and given one of the girls there the picture Harry had made him, blood and all.

The tattoo artist had been kind. She gave it to him for the price of the ink and sent him on his way with the standard pamphlet outlining after care and he'd followed it with a near religious fervour.

To this day he's unsure what drove him to it. What could have possible justified such a colossal waste of money during a time when he'd had almost none. But he knows that he doesn't regret it. When he looks at it he remembers the consequences of things. That offerings like that are never what they seem. He remembers the price of believing the best and being proved wrong.

And years later, when Sherlock finds it, as Sherlock inevitably finds everything, he recognises something in it. Or at least, he recognises that a blood-stained tattoo can never bode well. He doesn't say anything. He goes silent instead and then disappears for a day and a half, a day and a half that leaves John pacing and fearful, so that when Sherlock does finally come back, he doesn't register at first the softness in his face out of sheer relief at seeing that face at all.

But it's hours later now. Hours past since Sherlock had come through that door and John had gone to him, torn between hitting him and hugging him, wanting to demand where he's been and wanting to kiss him into silence. Hours since then, since Sherlock had taken the decision out of John's hands and kissed him, soft and long and intense, then wordlessly taken him to the bedroom where chilled hands had stripped him and laid him out like an offering on the bed.

Hours since Sherlock had taken the delicate brush and the paint he had bought, black and red, and started to paint. Long swirling lines, starting with the tattoo, steel and vines, carrying on and covering, blending Harry's black lines and John's red blood into something else.

It's hypnotic almost, the faint feather-touch of the brush, the immediate cool of the paint before being warmed by his body. He dozes off as Sherlock works, the spider web of meaningless design, filled with purpose, and he only wakes with the touch of a hand on his head, fingers pushing through his hair.

“Don't smudge it,” Sherlock murmurs, his first words since this had begun, and John looks down to see himself turned into something else. A canvas, where the steel is strong and the vines that twine about it add to its strength instead of eating it away. The small patch of Harry's blood-eaten design is swallowed whole.

Neither of them talk about it. There are only hands, Sherlock's, carefully pushing at John's legs, spreading and pulling them apart and John lets it happen without a word, his whole body passive, afraid to shift and mar the artwork he's become.

Sherlock doesn't ask. With a warning glance he leaves John's legs suspended and spread, easing a pillow underneath his hips till John is utterly exposed. Sherlock starts with a finger, touching nothing else, and John is hyper aware of the invading force of it inside him, that single point of contact between them, somehow more than it should be.

By the time Sherlock eases three fingers into John, John is shuddering with coiled tension. He tries once to push into those fingers but Sherlock immediately pulls away and with a stern glance he warns once again: “Don't smudge it.”

John whimpers but goes still, waiting for the return of those fingers, but when they don't return he looks up to see Sherlock, framed between his spread legs, spreading lubrication over his penis. John's own cock, hard for ages now, twitches obscenely between his legs, rolling against his belly and he notices for the first time that there's a blank patch among the steel and vines, there where it's laying, as if Sherlock had planned for this all along. Then John chides himself, because of course Sherlock planned for this. Had probably calculated the exact width and length of John's cock based on average statistical data for the adult human male, carefully creating his artwork around those perimeters. John could laugh at it, he thinks. Just not now, because now Sherlock's eyes are on him again, on that aching, empty place between John's legs, and John watches as he carefully leans forward, his penis in his hand and aiming carefully for that spot, careful not to touch anywhere else.

And when he reaches it, when John feels the first touch of Sherlock's cock against that hollow place between his legs, there is the momentary resistance of muscle before Sherlock is sliding in, pushing in and thrusting gently back and forth, easing himself inside, and John is groaning, a long hoarse sound of need, watching that pale length vanishing between his legs, being swallowed by his body. He wishes Sherlock would grab him, would take his legs and push inside and he nearly asks, nearly begs, but he doesn't because he knows the answer already:  _“Don't smudge it.”_

And when Sherlock is completely inside him, when John is panting at the fullness, at the heat where he's never felt heat before, and Sherlock starts to  _move,_  pulling out and pushing back in, filling him and emptying him and John is open-mouthed in wonder because the strangeness of it, this disembodied feeling of something inside him that shouldn't be, wholly unconnected with any other part of his body, only then does John finally speak. Unconnected words, as unreal as the force of nature that's pulling him apart.  _Please, please, please, Sherlock, please._  John hears them himself and has no idea what he's asking for. His entire body is utterly sensationless with no other point of touch to hone in on apart from the long, hard length of the thing pushing in and out of his hole. His awareness contracts down to that single point of his anatomy, that single event in time, until nothing else matters, not Sherlock, not himself, not the noises he is making, an endless litany of prayers and pleas that mean nothing.

And then, like lightning, like something striking him, there is the touch of a hand on his cock. A single touch, and he shouts, surprised, as he comes. He feels the warmth spattering across his torso, and then the grunt of completion from Sherlock as something hot and wet blooms deep, deep inside him, and seconds later a sigh, deep and weary and filled with something wonderful.

Then Sherlock is beside him, the weight shifting on the mattress and John, stuck as he is with his legs in the air and the feeling of something wet and cooling dripping from inside him and onto the sheets, waits until the pressure of Sherlock's hand on his thigh tells him its okay, that he can rest now, and he does, rolling into the warm body beside him, and he feels Sherlock's smile against the top of his head. “It's okay,” he says. “You can smudge it now.”


End file.
